Love it or hate it, once you've met Alex Migliore's work, there's one thing you can't do; ignore it. He has a kind of surreal grasp of the stuff of life which inevitably informs his poetry.
Born in Maidstone in Kent 26 years ago, of a Sicilian father and an English mother, (what he refers to as his 'dark roots'), he now lives in London, where he works 'punching numbers into a computer and answering telephones'. His early work, which has been called 'raw' by some commentators, nonetheless sparks with the kind of unusual energy that draws readers back to it. In his later work, he has learned to trust the value of space around his words, to know that his reader will fill in the gaps. In addition, his work is full of golden nuggets of wisdom, lines that for me at least, have me sighing, "Oh! I wish I'd written that!"
So where does it come from, this insight of his, this gift of peeling back the mind? Alex says the poetry came before his awareness that it even was poetry.
"I was writing songs at the time, so I was writing what I thought were lyrics… which I then went home and typed up on a word-processor that a friend lent me. And for some reason, I never stopped. They only really became 'poems' about a year or two later… I wasn't aware of them being poems really. I hadn't really read any poetry at that stage."
Alex said at this point that he still doesn't think of himself as a writer. I suggested to him that perhaps it is rather that he is a different thinker, that he thinks along different lines, along different planes to most people.
"I guess so," he said, "I've always been a bit of a weirdo."
I told him, that may be so, but I think it's a good weirdo. He said that he doesn't tell people he's a writer if he can avoid it, but at times, his friends do tell people, and they don't quite know what to make of him.
We then went on to talk about his open prison broadsheets, which is how I first came upon his work.
"Even that goes down wrong," he said. "People are suspicious of the name."
I told him, I thought it was a terrific name, with so much implied meaning. It came, he said, as a happy accident.
"The name open prison actually came about during a conversation with an acquaintance of mine. I was trying to stop him talking about another ugly business idea when it just fell out of my mouth. 'It's people like you,' I said, my veins expanding, a hand touching the cool steel of my (metaphorical) gun. 'people like you that see to it we live in this open prison.' I didn't know what I was talking about. It was late, the table seemed to be more like a life support system and I hadn't been able to open my eyes for the last hour and a half! Sometimes things you say just stick."
Alex prints his broadsheets up himself, and gives them out free to anyone who shows interest in his work. I have a copy of bargaining for a place in the sun, which features work described by Jonathan Penton, of Unlikely Stories in the US as having "a sort of sociological sadness… he writes of the emptiness, not only of his own life, but of the lives of humans in general." I have to say, I don't quite see it that way. Certainly there is a degree of pessimism about the human condition, but the message is often cut with his own brand of self deprecating humour - this from some sort of progress: …
yeah, that's me
nearly 25
with a shite job
no woman
2 haemorrhoids
too many poems
and a dead man's shoes
on my feet -I can't believe that things
are finally picking up.How, I wondered, did Alex develop his poems.
"Maybe I see something in the newspaper, or someone walks by on the street singing, or whatever. It starts as an original idea or line that I somehow want to work into a poem. I very rarely sit down with concrete lines in mind, and very rarely is there anything left of the original other than the spreading of the essence within it."
I went back at this point to his somewhat lateral approach to things, the way he goes off at tangents. He told me that this is indeed how he thinks.
"I never think of something and then think, 'oh, I should twist it off that way'. It just happens, and sometimes, I'll sit there and I'll laugh, and I'll say, 'I've never thought of that before,' and I'll stand up and walk around the room feeling proud that I've got a good line. It's very satisfying. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it's… as though you're teaching yourself how to look at things when you're writing."
PAGE OR PERFORMANCE
When I first talked to Alex about the possibility of an interview, I asked him about performance poetry. I made the mistake of assuming that as a young man living in London and writing the sort of poetry he was writing, he would naturally be part of the circuit. I was very wrong, and he didn't pull any punches in telling me."I'm not really that interested in performance poetry at all. Readings always remind me of local raffles or something... and next we have, a beautiful poet, with a winning smile, ladies and gentlemen, number13!!!! But seriously, there's this unnerving aspect to them... as if each poet has brought in a drama student to read their poems for them... and why do most people have to smile after the punch line as if they have just experienced a moment of true significance, or the aftermath of a long overdue sexual encounter?"
He and I talked on this subject at length, and it came out that he has a really strong aversion to performance. I had to agree that performance poetry tends to be more about the performance than the poetry, that it devalues the poetry to some extent. It later transpired that Alex feels his poetry wouldn't necessarily go down well in performance, and also, that he'd be so nervous about actually doing it.
"They'd introduce me and I'd be gone!"
Although he started writing poetry before he'd actually read any, he now reads widely.
"At the moment I'm reading nothing but Robert Creeley. No one - at least that I have read - comes close to him when it comes to putting himself on the page… if you were to meet him in a bar, he would already feel like a close friend... I get the feeling from his poetry that I know him both individually and as a group... the personalities just seem to melt into one... a 'one' I respect very much.
He has also, he says, been greatly influenced by the work of Portugese poet Fernando Pessoa.
"He writes under several, distinct pseudonyms, and his 'poet characters', each with a particular body of work, rebound off the page with immense drama and a quite wonderful depersonalisation."
Whatever his influences, I'm prepared to stick my neck out and predict that Alex Migliore is likely to gather a major audience for his work in the future. For those who would like to see more of it right now, his latest collection, Pandemic, is published by Chanticleer Press under the auspices of poet and publisher Richard Livermore. To some extent, the book is the result of a collaboration between the two, Alex the writer, Livermore the editor.
"He has," says Alex, "been a really good friend to me… been really helpful."
Pandemic represents a good cross-section for anyone wanting to read more of Alex's poetry. It comes with an excellent and though-provoking introduction by Richard Livermore, and can be obtained direct from Alex at (FL5) 9 Pinfold Road, Streatham, London, SW16 2SL, UK. The book costs: £3.00, $6.00, or 5.00 euros, inc. p&p. Please mention this feature when you write.
To read more of Alex's work, click here
© Zoe King 2003